Peering into the Noise

A large aspect of working DX is being in the right place at the right time.  TY1AA in Benin came up on 30M this afternoon at 1936Z (15:36 local).  30M at this time of day and this time of year is very much like 40M, noisy as heck.  Here is a shot of daytime 30M with the noise blanker off

Note the bright green waterfall and the S meter.  You aren't hearing Benin through that!  Here is a shot with the NB on.

A clear 12 dBm improvement.  Increasing selectivity to 25hz bandwidth further improves S/N by 20 dBm compared to no noise blanker.

Copying at 25hz however requires being dead on in terms of freq.  

I still can only copy the Benin station only occasionally but I expect he will build as nightfall progresses

Spot Collector in DX labs gives some clue to the pileup

This reporting station states he worked TY1AA "up 2"   So I look at the panadadapter/waterfall and sure enought you can make out a pileup about 2khz wide

This is confirmed on skimmerfall

You can just make out about signals about 2 khz wide almost perfect bookends.  As I write this I can hear the Benin station continue to build.  Before he was nonexistent now he is 3/3, its 20:36Z 

The latest spot collector report is 

and 

So I'm going to start mashing the key with my measly 200W and see what happens

Update:  9-12-2014 After all that I was never able to get him.  He was working a wall of Japanese and almost no USA.  Today I flipped on 17M and using skimmer had him in the log in 3 calls (less than 5 minutes)

Like I said "right place right time"  Now let's see what I can do about this ZD9XF joker on Tristan da Cunha 

73  W9OY